Ashmolean: Egypt

I didn't realise the old place had so much Egypt in it. See set: Ashmolean, Oxford 2023/12. This post created in the hope I might fund these pictures again one day. There's also an Assyrian protective spirit, but I didn't find that.

Superb stuff. I like to imagine - it would be what my novel was about, if I ever wrote one - that these beasts and gods really used to walk amongst men, and the sculpters simply drew what they saw; but over the millennia we have forgotten what once was, and assume the images are merely fabulous.

Stepping back a little to around 3300 BC, we have a colossol statue of the fertility god Min (see-also).

3300 BC is an unfathomable amount of time away. Quasi-randomly, a vulture's head.

And then, suddenly, the Greeks took a completely different turn.